A reminder of how much of success is luck/timing.

And remember Quibi [1]? Short-form video in vertical format specifically for mobile devices? They didn't have every aspect nailed, but they were definitely trailblazers on that front.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi

Quibi launched in April 2020. TikTok by this point would have 2 billion downloads [1]. It's difficult to assess they were trailblazers here. I might even say a component of their failure is free mobile video was widely accessible by this point.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-downl...

Didn't have every aspect nailed? Definitely trailblazers? Quibi is a prime example of an absolute business wipeout. They got a bunch of investor money together, showed no interest in what viewers actually want, and then went down in flames immediately upon public release of the product. The whole thing was a disaster that didn't accomplish anything beyond putting a bunch of capital in the pockets of C grade C suite players.

Was that at all like TikTok? I thought it was professional creators, not community-sourced.

They really dropped the ball.

Or YouTube. Short form animation was the largest draw of views in the early days before they chose to kill it and become a "serious platform"

I thought the kept incentivizing longer content so they could cram more ads into the videos. Hard to get some one to watch a 20 second ad for a 2 minute video, but if you can convince everyone to pad that thing up to 10 minutes you could stuff at least 2 ads in there.

It got Kodak'd.